Tick Tock: Insect Figuration, Temporal Estrangement and Historiographic Critique in Postmodern and Contemporary Literature, Art, and Film

Abstract

This dissertation engages with posthumanist and postmodern theory, critical animal studies, and critiques of modern temporality and historiography to examine how insect figures trouble dominant understandings of historical time in contemporary Western literature, film, and art. It argues that insect figuration, as a way of “thinking with insects,” offers a strategy for deconstructing concepts such as human exceptionalism, progressive linear history, and colonial imperialism. These concepts, which have been central to colonialism and the work of yoking human and nonhuman energies to capitalist production, are ill-suited to address the manifold challenges of the Anthropocene (the present defined by human impact on the planet); by denaturalizing these hegemonic modes of perception, insect figures aid in the timely work of reconceiving and reconfiguring multispecies earthly relationships.The dissertation advances its claims by surveying critiques of temporal ideology and by closely reading a series of cultural texts. It gives an overview of insect temporality as a dislocating force in postmodern culture, before moving into a closer study of entomological artworks in the neo-Victorian and steampunk subgenres. It shows how these artworks reproduce a nineteenth century fascination with insects’ forms and affects, which is a key element of their efforts to defamiliarize that period’s culture and the clock-and-calendar-based historicity to which it gave rise. It then undertakes an extended case study of author China Miéville’s steampunk Bas-Lag trilogy and shows that, far from reifying pernicious values associated with the Victorian period, Miéville’s time-play exemplifies the use of insect and insectile figures to contest such values. This dissertation charts insect figures' provocative yet under-recognized ability to unsettle normative structures, and explores how this capacity can proliferate affects in the present and future, while opening up foreclosed possible meanings for the past.